NixOS is awful except for everything else out there. The learning curve is... steep. The documentation sucks. You have to learn a new OS because a lot of your prior Linux knowledge no longer applies.

But, man, it's so slick when you get it working. It's so easy to understand your system and how it's set up. There's no weird stuff changing between updates that you don't know about. You don't have to merge new configurations. It's so easy to try something new without changing your system. Rollbacks are awesome. It's easy to move your config to a new machine or keep multiple machines in sync. My machines were constantly getting out of sync as far as packages, versions, config, etc. and it was a headache to maintain them all the way I like. Not anymore. It's so easy to maintain working NixOS systems. I have the same packages, users, and config on my machines without having to think about it. I have automatic updates going where I get a new system when I reboot. It basically works like an appliance I don't have to think about except it's set up the way I want it instead of how someone else decided it should work.

There are so many nice things about NixOS, but it sucks. It's the worst thing out there except for everything else. I hate it and I feel like I can't go back either. I would love a NixOS-like system with a better language, documentation on par with Arch, and the reliability of Debian.

I'm currently trying (and failing, lol) to switch to Nickel Nix. Nix OS/Pkgs is just amazing, but i'm near being entirely done with Nix Lang. Lazy + Dynamic is just a recipe for an awful developer experience.

As far as i can tell no one (thus far) has been able to explain a reasonable and concrete way to tell what any given variable is within a Nix source file. `nix repl` works decently for some cases, but many not - since it seems to mostly help you inspect the output of a Nix expression. So hypothetically it could work, but for any given variable you'd have to recreate the entire value/function/etc stack that produced that value in that state.

All around after ~16 months i think i'm finally done with Nix. It's Nickel or the highway for me. Not that i even love Nickel that much, but it's the bare bones of what Nix should have been in my view.

Not sure if it's a hot take or not.. but it feels like you can have Lazy or Dynamic, but never both. The DX is terrible with both.

I didn't use it yet, but looks like this supposed to do it.